Protecting community rights over traditional knowledge

Many communities face increasing threats to their resource rights due to the spread of western intellectual property rights (IPRs), often through Free Trade Agreements. If IPRs are granted too easily they can confer rights over community resources to others and do not require consent or benefit-sharing when community resources are used.

They can also limit the rights of farmers to use, sell or exchange a bio-resource, which can be a serious problem if your livelihood depends on it.

This action-research project, which ran from 2004-09, developed tools to allow communities to maintain control over their knowledge and related bio-resources, helping them to take advantage of market opportunities and preventing them from being exploited and misappropriated.

What IIED did

This project explored the customary laws and practices of indigenous and local communities to identify appropriate mechanisms to protect their resource rights and knowledge systems.

It involved participatory research at community level to strengthen local capacity and develop local tools for protecting traditional knowledge – including biocultural registers, biocultural community protocols and biocultural products.

It also informed policies on traditional knowledge and biodiversity at local, national and international levels, and developed the concept of collective biocultural heritage, which provided the common framework to link different studies on this theme in China, India, Kenya, Panama and Peru.

Watch a short film that explores the status and threats to biocultural heritage, and the responses needed, on IIED's YouTube channel, or below: